I think with a lot of these missions, you had the commanders who were idealists, or those seeking fame and fortune, and then you have the all workers who just didn’t have better options.
We’d like to think of our military as volunteer service-people, but the reality is that it’s a pathway out of poverty for many. So how much “choice” to believe in the mission is there?
Remember that we're talking about a generation ship - after a very short fraction of the mission time, everyone will have been born on the ship.
(Does the ship have a class system? Is the ship structured as a commune? Do people "own" bits of it, or is it more of a feudal tenure system? Can you maintain a multigenerational society on a military command structure when there is no external enemy other than the vastness of space? Would you want to?)
I agree with your sentiment, but military service - around the world - is more of an alternative to povery vs. a path out. And we can't build a corporation with a goal more than two quarters out, or a government more than the next midterm election; what are the odds we find 5+ generations of commanders who can stay aligned?
>And we can't build a corporation with a goal more than two quarters out
Yet that is what all the corporations at the top of the market cap lists have done over the previous 30 years. You think Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, TSMC, and a multitude of others only have goals 2 quarters out?
Pharmaceutical businesses where the trials take 5 and 10+ years to bring a medicine to market don't have long term goals? Oil businesses that need a decade to build and cultivate an offshore field. There are so many other examples.
From an American perspective, this is flat-out not the case. The majority of American servicemembers come from the middle three quintiles of income - it is literally a middle-class institution. It IS an alternative means to acquire a college education for the lower middle class, but the bottom quintile, the truly poor, generally do not qualify to serve.
We’d like to think of our military as volunteer service-people, but the reality is that it’s a pathway out of poverty for many. So how much “choice” to believe in the mission is there?